Making Your Blog Posts Count
by Leeia Ladipoh on February 15th, 2008
Running a blog is a way of business these days. Blogs help bring customers in to read your posts - and has them stay to see what your business has to offer.
In a perfect world, the posts on your blog would come up in search engine listings or be linked to other blogs - and a flood of people would read your words, become interested in you and your product and then make a purchase from your business.
But making this perfect world come to life takes some work.
Here are some tips to making your blogs more valuable and more attractive to your readers:
1. Interest Over Items - While you want to reel in potential customers and have them rush to your site to make a purchase, the way to do this is not to flood your blog with information about your items. This is going to bore and turn off the casual reader.
Blog readers want to find something interesting and valuable to them. If you are selling jewelry , you could have a blog about the newest jewelry trends or what the stars were wearing at the award shows. Then you can have a link to one of your items that is similar to a necklace being worn by one of the big stars.
Your items should be downplayed, while the big focus is on the stuff that is interesting to the masses.
2. Offer Valuable Information - Want to really get readers to visit your website? Skip talking about your products. Instead, be helpful. If you have a website that deals with hair care products, your blog should not be pushing your latest items, but should instead deal with things that are important to people working with and using hair care products.
You could talk about a problem a client had and then give the play-by-play of how to fix it. If one person had the problem, chances are there are plenty of others out there with it, too. When people with a problem go to a search engine looking for an answer to their question, and your blog comes up, you will be the person who helped them out and will gain their immediate loyalty.
3. Think Like A Searcher - Instead of thinking like a seller, you need to think like the people you want to have visit your website (your potential customers). People who are looking for your particular products are probably going to find you when they do a search. You want to get the people who don’t know exactly what they are looking for, but know what kind of help they need.
By building blogs with helpful information, and filling it with keywords that relate to your industry, people will stumble into the blog, then onto your products.
Remember, blogging is not about direct sales . It is instead an indirect sales program. Instead of titles like “Why Company X Hair Spray is The Best”, think of more all-encompassing titles like “The Top 5 Ways to Have Movie Star Hair” (blog readers love lists).
You will be able to bring in a more broad audience, educate them on how to get what they want, and then subtly let them know you have the items that can help them do it.